City of Rochester – Siddharth Walia – 2017

Goals 

The City of Rochester had a goal of becoming a green and sustainable city. This meant focus would have to be put on improving the energy efficiency of street lighting and lighting of other public areas, which makes up a significant portion of municipal energy use and costs. Building off the work of two previous EDF Climate Corps fellows, the City of Rochester enlisted Siddarth Walia to baseline the city’s sustainability activities and prioritize areas of opportunity to be included in a work plan for their sustainability office. 

Solutions

To gather data, Walia conducted interviews and sought recommendations from multiple stakeholders. The data, combined with the qualitative inputs, was used to create informed decisions for making the financial and environmental case for several energy efficiency and GHG reduction projects. 

Walia recommended focusing on three projects:

• A life cycle cost analysis of converting street lights to LEDs
• A life cycle cost analysis of LED retrofit for City Hall and two fire stations
• Research on feasibility study for a bike share program 

Potential Impact

Over their lifetimes, Walia’s projects could save the City of Rochester $8.6 million in net operational costs. Annually, they could save 3.9 million kilowatt hours of electricity and 2,740 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.